Peter Beard
1991 (made) 1994 (print)
Diary Page, Thurs - Friday June 27-28, '91

Gelatin silver print
38.5 x 48.5 cm
 
Lempertz - Cologne
Auction 1109, Photographie, 1 June 2018, Lot: 165
 
Already in his youth, the medium of the diary played a decisive role for Peter Beard and later became an integral part of his extensive artistic work. Parallel to his photographs, in which Beard, resident in Kenya since 1961, thematises the exploitation and destruction of the African continent, but in particular the extermination of the local animal population by human civilisation, he systematically devotes himself over many years to the elaborate design of his "diaries". Finely elaborated pencil drawings, occasionally reminiscent of the Old Masters, written notes, fragments of newspaper articles, postcards, entrance tickets and stamps form a complex, often hermetic network of relationships. In his inscription of the present photographic work, Beard refers explicitly to the genocide in Rwanda, in which several hundreds of thousands of the indigenous Tutsi and moderate Hutu were murdered between April and July 1994. In order to visualise the cruelty and merciless brutality of the events, the artist implements the image of an opened diary, on which he had previously draped various animal organs - including heart and liver - as well as a bone fragment and a stone. Furthermore, the artist refuses simple legibility and clear attributions. "In our civilised world there is certainly nothing remotely comparable, and whoever penetrates its many delusional layers, falls through the rabbit hole into a world of visual wordplay and tormenting parallels - models and Masai, politicians and pop icons, bra advertisements and sun-bleached bones, lions and insane people, crocodiles and self-mockery, canned soups and severed heads, private heroes and enemies of the people, rhinos, bloodstains, strippers and the starving. Themes are presented in haunting fugues and then return again and again in seemingly infinite variations. As a composer and conductor, as a producer of contradictions, Beard combines everything with meticulous drawings, almost compulsively filigree handwritten notes […]. This world of intoxication with images is a rudimentary, alchemistic-supersensual event, to which the artist feels he is driven - that one could evoke a kind of epiphany when things that have nothing in common are forced together like the diverging poles of magnets. Perhaps, however, these collisions should have no other effect than the desire to advance further. It would appear that every image, every page, represents an experiment in the quest for some unique, all-encompassing theory, the unexpected answer to an unrecognized question.” (cited according to Owen Edwards, Allesfresser, quoted in: Nejma Beard/David Fahey (ed.), Peter Beard, Cologne i.a. 2013, p. 60).
 
LL/83384